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I hunted a site that has been active in our city’s history since its very beginnings. The school sitting there is the modern version of the school that was there in the 1870’s. Unfortunately, the dirt at this site has been moved countless times as other structures were built and torn down and at least one railway crossed it. Still, I was hopeful a coin or two may have been left unmolested in the ground.

After almost an hour of digging bits of zinc and old brass, I managed to dig a 1940 wheat cent, then my lunch hour was over. On my way back to the car I could see the thousands of square inches I did not ran my coil over, each with the potential of having a coin under it.

I have mentioned this before. If you think of the site you are working as a collection of square inches, then, maybe, you will be more careful about exploring each and every one of those square inches. I am just saying.

Again, I didn’t take a picture of my wheat; you know what a wheat looks like. I am really enjoying my metal detecting these days. I hope you all are too.

For lunch today, I returned to the Iron Pit. The Iron Pit is a segment of river bank where, a few years back, I found a number of wheats and other old bits just laying on the surface. Eventually the Iron Pit yielded silver and gold and many other cool things. One of the funnest things about the Iron Pit, was finding a relatively large number of small silver pieces; charms, small rings, bits of earrings; that sort of thing.

Along with all that, I found a number of small transportation tokens from the early days of Wichita. I suspect, although I never was able to corroborate this, that this spot was a stop in the InterUrban rail system that existed in my city before the 1940’s. This would explain the amount of coinage and tokens and the bits of silver jewelry (plus two gold rings). This would also explain the high concentration of iron there.

Since I am back to gold hunting, I decided to return to see if the rains of the past couple of years had washed up something I missed. I didn’t take a picture but today i found a number of bits of foil and two non-ferrous targets: a 1928 wheat cent and a brass ring, not the jewelry kind, more like it belonged to some machine. Both items gave nice signals and neither was deeper than five inches.

Yesterday, I went back to a couple of spots that have been producing coins for me. The first was at the 1884 park where I have an 5′ x 10′ area that won’t stop giving up coins and the second was at another old park (1887) where I pulled a number of old coins this past Summer from an area equally as small.

I didn’t take a picture but I found two wheats from one park and one wheat and two copper pennies from the 70’s from the other. Again, these coins were there every time I hunted those two spots before and I missed them.

Anyway, today at lunch I tried a different park (1886) and as I was detecting, the thought struck me that there hundreds of spots in the old parks where I’ve never ran my detector. The possibilities are endless.

You may think me overly optimistic for no reason but in fact I do have a reason and I am going to tell you about it.
Before the Great Depression, Wichita was a happening place. I don’t mean just a good place to be at; I mean THE place to be at. Wichita was slated to become the next Chicago. Movers and shakers were relocating here in troves. Opportunity flowed through the city streets and anyone with a modicum of spunk could make it big. All these successful and driven people needed a place to be seen and a place to relax after a hard day of getting rich and our city parks were a great place to do just that. That is why I get excited at the thought of all those areas in our old parks I’ve never touched.

Before I had to go back to work, I pursued a faint signal under an old tree among a roar of iron grunts. at the bottom of a nine inch hole sat a spoon:

Sometime in the 20’s I would guess, one of those early Wichita dreamers sat near the Arkansas river with his lovely companion to have a pick-nick. Between laughter, drinks, and talk about their bright future, one of them dropped this spoon and forgot all about it.
(Or a hobbo during the Depression ate his hobbo stew with an old spoon he found somewhere). Take your pick. It is still a cool find.

Pardon my Bulgarian. Nah! I don’t really speak Bulgarian but I did teach myself to read the Cyrillic script. Incidentally, that last word, with four characters, spells the word ‘park’ just like in English.

I returned to the deep silver park at lunch today. Now that I can ground balance the Bliss like a boss (OK, maybe not like a boss but well enough) I wanted to let my Blisstool V3 metal detector loose on a patch of park where I have gravely removed all targets but the iron. Mind you, I have removed a lot of iron as well.

Right away, I began to get nice solid signals. I am not shocked that I found the aluminum foil. In this spot, there stood a swing set from about the 30’s to the 60’s. I have found close to a hundred of what appear to be aluminum seals for old timey milk and juice glass bottles. I remember those suckers from my childhood. Somehow I missed them with the Deus. Most were at the 7-8 inch mark. They could also be from Boy Scout and Girl Scout camp outs as I have also found a good number of Scout related items at this spot in the past. They are distinctively round and gold colored.

I was rather surprised however to pull that beaver tail pull tab. I could swear there were no such signals left here. Then I found that 1946d Wheat cent. No matter how many times I declare this spot coin free, I am proven wrong. By the way, I intend to keep on posting my Wheaties. First, because I want to prove that you can use the Blisstool V3 to detect trashy parks and still find coins. Second, when I start finding the really cool stuff, and I will, I want all the haters to know I don’t plant coins for my self-glorification and if I was to do that, I most certainly would not plant Wheats from the 40’s!

I am pleased with the progress I am making with Dragomir. I have a very good feeling about this machine.

I went out this morning for a couple of hours with my Blisstool V3 metal detector to the small park I’ve been hunting lately.

My plan was simple: dig.

It is my opinion that you cannot learn and master your metal detector unless you dig a lot of trash. To train my ear, I dug and dug and dug until I could dig no more. I dug a lot of shallow targets. By doing that, I could see that the discriminator circuitry works really well when it comes to targets down to about 7 inches. I dug some deep targets too and past 7 inches the discriminator got fooled a few times but still it was impressive.

I am slowly honing in to the sweet signals. The 1910 wheat pictured above was such a signal. This tiny park still has a lot to give up, and I am just the guy to get it.

It was nice and sunny today at lunch so I took Dragomir, my Blisstool V3 metal detector to the oldest park in the city. I’ve talked about this park before. It is a small park, smaller than a city block in fact but it has produced some nice silver and other old coinage for me with a variety of metal detectors.

As far as trash, this park is at DEFCON 4. It is hard to hunt with any detector if you don’t have the patience. Definitely it is the kind of park where a small coil would be indicated. Except that the coins I am hunting are too deep for a small coil. So I must endure the cacophony of beeps.

After I successfully ground balanced the Bliss manually (I had to clean a spot using auto ground balance in order to do it) I eventually got the kind of signal I was looking for. I decided to implement the Money Maker Protocol because now that I can manually ground balance the machine, I get fooled by shallow small aluminum. At any rate after making sure that it was no shallow small aluminum I kept digging until I got to the target:

No silver but yet another old coin. 1916 D Wheat cent. No too badly worn so it must have been dropped closed to its mint date. This cent was minted when the U.S. had not yet entered WWI and Wichita was experiencing a growth boom.

With time and practice, my ears will become more attuned to the winning signals.

Yesterday I went to another old park in my city at lunch time. Since I’ve changed the settings on my XP Deus metal detector, I have yet again began to revisit old sites that I thought were bereft of good targets.

At this spot, back in 2013, I found two war nickels and one mercury dime from the 20’s plus a handful of wheats from the 40’s and 50’s. I began hunting with my new settings and before my lunch hour was over I had managed to find two more wheats; one, at a little over 8 inches deep, was a 1927D.

The other one, found at about 5 inches deep, was a 1952D.

What’s interesting about these two wheats is the difference in depth at which they were found. As I said before, at this spot I had found a handful of coins from the 40’s and 50s. I remember well that those coins were also found around 5 inches deep except for the merc from the 20’s which was found around 8 inches deep.

So why the difference? The answer lies on the fact that back at the turn of the century, a house sat at the spot. You can see the house in a 1938 aerial photograph of the park but not in a 1950 aerial photograph of the same park. What makes me think that the house was built at the turn of the century and not after you may ask? There are houses on the opposite side of the street that are of the Italianate style (that’s the proper name of the style we call Victorian) and so I assume that the house that stood at that spot of the park was also of the same style. I could be wrong.

The important fact however is that by 1950, the house was gone and the land had become part of the park. This brings me to the mystery of the different depths for the coins. I posit that the coins from the 40’s and 50’s were dropped by people using the park after the house was gone but the older coins from the 20’s were dropped by the inhabitants of said house while the house was still standing.

This is probably of no interest whatsoever to neurologically typical folk (that’s fancy scientific talk for what we call normal) but to metal detectorists, this information is of great value. Now I know that there are things from an earlier time deep in the dirt there. I am still digging old house parts from there; you know, the stuff made of brass and ornate even though they were utilitarian objects such as valves and such. Another thing that I now know is that I must remove all the trash near the surface so that I can reveal all the deep and old stuff that is being masked.

One last thing; I tell people that a mid level detector such as the AT Pro or the F5 is good enough to find 80% of what a high end detector will. This begs the question as to why we should spend the money on a high end detector. The answer is that a high end detector can grow and change and add dimensions to your hunt. I am not advocating you should run and spend a couple of grand on a new machine. Let your present machine pay for a new machine later. When you are more experienced and are ready to expand your hunt, consider a high end machine.

I am glad to have a standby park that will provide me with silver in lean times. I have spoken about this park extensively in the past and I am happy to know that other people have began to hunt it besides me. I know there are 1000’s of coins still under that dirt, alas, a little too deep for most detectors today. I plan on buying a Russian detector later this year that will hopefully get me to those coins.

Anyway, I decided to hunt the ol’ standby at lunch today in spite of a light drizzle falling and getting everything wet. By the way, the XP Deus is almost water proof as the stock headphones are rain proof. If you remove the controller and put it in your pocket (or in a zip lock bag) you’re good to go in the rain.

It was a good hunt:

A dateless Buffalo (only the second one this year), a 1946 wheat, and a 1958 Roosevelt dime. The button is kind of cool too. It reminds me of the coat buttons of the 50’s and 60’s.

So this year has been very different than last year, both in the time dedicated to the hobby and in the number of finds but I won’t complain too much as I am very blessed elsewhere. Perhaps this year will be a year of quality instead of quantity. I mean, I already found a Shield nickel, who knows what else is around the corner?

I went back to the oldest park in Wichita for lunch today. I continue to explore the new 11 inch coil on the Deus. It’s a new paradigm I tell you. So I decided to try a new area of the park. It’s funny how a small park such as this has ‘areas’ but yet it does. Right away I began to get signals at a spot that didn’t have signals before. The first target was a 1907 Indian Head cent. Soon after, another 1907 Indian came out of the ground. Then a couple of memorials, then a cool medical pin mixed in with trash. Last, I pulled a 1918D wheat cent.

I think I have found the spot at the park that will yield the Seated coin. I got a slim signal there; I would say this was my first whisper with the 11 inch coil. I dug a foot deep and found a Bell jar’s lid with the glass insert at the bottom. I broke all to pieces trying to extract it. I was really hoping that there would be coins with it but alas, it was not to be. Then I got another whisper. I dug an 11 inch deep hole and at the bottom I found a piece of brass that appeared to have designs on it. You can see it pictured above with the coins. So I surmise that this part of the park has not been messed with much and all the old stuff is fairly deep. I left many, many signals undug because I ran out of time but it is for sure that I will hit that spot hard in the coming hunts. There is a Seated coin there and I WILL find it. 🙂

I took Maurice down to Riverside park again today at lunch. I decided to return to an area that appears was a pond at one time. The earliest aerial photo I can find, from 1938, shows that the pond was already dry by then. Anyway, I’ve found a few old coins along the erstwhile bank so I thought I would try again.

Not too long into the hunt, I got a deep squeak and I decided it was worth digging. Around the eight inch mark I pulled this, my fiftieth silver coin of the year.

It’s another 1899 Barber dime with no mint mark (which means it was minted in Philadelphia). Two things to note here: The coin was laying against rusted iron and the coin was at one time, exposed to water for a considerable time. I thus deduce that this coin was dropped when there was water in the pond. Brilliant, I know.

Before I covered the hole, I scanned it with the pinpointer and I got another hit! Unfortunately, it was a piece of ancient barbed wire (I think) and possibly the piece of rusted iron the dime rested next to.

I did a cursorily cleaning on the coin and this is the best I can do for now:

After my mandatory 30 minutes, I called the hunt done:

The half round object near gave me a stroke. It was at the bottom of a 9 inch deep hole and I thought for sure I had a large cent! Alas, it is a piece of a very old pocket watch. It is decorated (it is cool how long ago we even decorated pieces that were not meant to be seen) and the holes and pits you see is where this piece fit with the other parts of the watch. The wheat cent is a 1944 and the square nail is the millionth square nail I have found in our city parks. I will never know for sure why there are soooo many square nails in our city parks.

Now, I only need to find another 50 silver coins between today and New Year’s to meet my goal of 100 silver coins for the year.